


Imaginary Numbers

by Rosie447



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Allison and Vanya are a Detective Duo, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon–Typical Subject Matter, Child Abuse, Coming of Age, Five is not a convincing 14-year-old, Gaslighting, Gen, Harm to Children, Mental Health Issues, Mystery, Panic Attacks, Post-Season/Series 01, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Sibling Bonding, Stressed Number Five | The Boy, The Commission, The Hargreeves are Good Siblings, They are still figuring it out though, Time Travel Hijinx, Vanya Hargreeves Has Powers, long fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:54:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29968062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosie447/pseuds/Rosie447
Summary: Almost a year after his disappearance, Five Hargreeves returns to the Umbrella Academy. As delighted as they are to see him, his siblings cannot help but notice that Five is not acting entirely like himself. He's easily distracted by men with briefcases, and won't give anyone a clear answer on where he's been. And for some reason, it might all have something to do with ordinary Number Seven.Or, Five escapes the Icarus Theater to wind up back in the Academy with his fourteen-year-old siblings. Siblings who are determined to figure out where he's been, no matter how far they have to go in search of answers.(Featuring donuts, time-traveling assassins, sibling bonding, and one family who cannot stop breaking the timeline.)
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, The Hargreeves Family
Comments: 21
Kudos: 78





	Imaginary Numbers

Reginald Hargreeves believed in maintaining a consistent schedule. As such, he sent his six remaining progeny to bed at precisely 8:35 PM every night and expected them to rise at 6:00 AM every morning (adequate enough time to complete 11 sleep cycles, which was the advised number for children 14 years of age). The only times in which this schedule fluctuated was when numbers One through Six were on missions that required them to be awake later or earlier, in which case the hours were adjusted accordingly to maintain the same duration. 

He believed a great number of other things too as they pertained to the raising of children, chief of which being that the cultural infatuation with the notion of parenthood had greatly overcomplicated the process. One did not require books or lessons on how to appropriately engage with and coddle them: a simple knowledge of human biology would more than suffice. How much sleep they required, what proportions of the food groups provided the most well-balanced diet, what times of day their brains would be more receptive to lessons, and what times would be better suited to physical activity in the form of training. All that was required was using this knowledge to create a maximally efficient schedule, and a commitment to maintaining said schedule.

The children went to bed at 8:35. Failure to fall asleep immediately would result in grogginess the next day, which would, on its own, condition their sleeping habits to fit with the schedule. The entire system required minimal interference.

It was 9:03 PM on a Thursday in November and Vanya Hargeeves couldn’t sleep.

She rolled over, staring at the silhouette of her dresser in the dark. In front of it were her music stand and practice chair, violin case leaning against the latter. To the other side was a stretch of wall, and then the window, the heavy curtains blocking out any stars that might have been visible through the ever-present thrum of city light pollution. 

Carefully, she sat up, folding back the comforter and sheets and sliding her feet into the pair of slippers resting on the hardwood floor. It was still technically autumn, but the floors were cold in the nights, and she’d never been able to sleep with socks on. Her footsteps were light as she slipped through the door, twisting the handle slowly behind her so that the click barely registered as a sound. 

Ben’s room was the closest to hers, and there was a shadow of faint, warm light creeping out from the space under his door. It was quiet, which meant that he was probably reading. He’d hidden  _ And Then There Were None  _ under the table at dinner, and Dad hadn’t noticed because Dad never paid much attention to that sort of thing. It was apparently about a group of terrible people who were invited to an island to be murdered for their crimes. (“They killed people,” he’d told Klaus. “But they got away with it because they didn’t do anything illegal. They were just selfish, and people died because of it. And this guy, he’s punishing them. It’s kind of scary, but also interesting.”) 

The room across from Ben’s was empty, with the door closed tightly. In the first few days after Five disappeared, the remaining members of the Umbrella Academy had descended upon his empty room like a pack of vultures. Vanya remembered standing by the doorway, her voice shaking, while Klaus pilfered through his desk for sharpies and Diego opened every drawer in his dresser, looking for the knives of his Five had taken to pulling from the wall they’d become lodged in and keeping whenever his brother got a bit overzealous during training. Even Ben had snagged a few of the physics books from his shelf, and though he’d returned them later he’d put them in the  _ wrong _ order so it wasn’t like how Five had left them at all. Luther had snapped at all of them for it, but Five’s stack of CDs was all messed up when she snuck in later.

She hadn’t gone in to take anything like the rest of them, but to sit on his bed and be alone. 

She’d cried then, and they’d rolled their eyes, because that was when all of them thought Five was coming back, like that gave them any right to go through his stuff. By the end of the first week, no one was going into Five’s room anymore. By the end of the first month, Pogo had locked the door, and no one said anything about it. 

Sometimes, Vanya thought that there might be a secret angry part of her that understood the killer from  _ And Then There Were None _ . She didn’t want to kill anyone, of course, but some days she imagined taking all of her siblings and Dad and Pogo and Mom and making them sit down in a room and pointing to the empty spot at the table where Five was supposed to sit and shouting  _ Five was talking about time travel and none of you tried to stop him, he disappeared and you didn’t go look for him, he’s been gone for almost a year and you act like you don’t even miss him, Five was the only one who was ever nice to me and you drove him away because you were all selfish my only friend is gone— _

When she imagined it, they all got very quiet, and maybe someone started crying, and they said things like  _ You’re right, Vanya.  _ And,  _ We’ve been terrible, Vanya.  _ And  _ How can we fix this?  _ And she would lead them all to the kitchen and teach them to make peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches because they were Five’s favorites, and they’d all go out into the city, holding the sandwiches on little plastic plates and call for Five in the darkness like they were looking for a lost dog. And even though they were all doing it now, and promising they’d be better, Five would find  _ her  _ first and hug her so tightly her shoulders started to hurt, and take her to Griddy’s to get donuts, and she’d say  _ maybe  _ they’d invite the rest of their siblings to come, if they acted  _ really truly sorry _ , and agreed to let her have all of the glazed donuts and promised to never sneak out to the bowling alley without her or play any of their ‘mission games’ in the living room during recreation time without explaining the rules to her again and they would promise of course and she’d forgive them because she was a nice person and really not much like that one guy in Ben’s book at all. 

The light was on in Allison’s room, too, and she heard soft giggling. 

Or maybe none of that would happen, and Vanya’d have them all in a room and her throat would close up and she wouldn’t be able to summon the anger or the veracity or the thousands of versions of the speech she’d written in her head while the rest of them did stupid training exercises and so she would just sit back down and things would go on exactly as they had before, only they’d start whispering amongst themselves about how Vanya was completely losing it she was when they thought she couldn’t hear. 

She walked down the stairs carefully avoiding the spots where the floorboards groaned. 

In the past few months, she’d gotten very good at navigating the kitchen with minimal light. She popped a few of the mini-marshmallows in her mouth and chewed while she spread the peanut butter on the bread. She didn’t like marshmallows much on their own, if she was honest (though since her violin lesson teacher – the first-chair at the local symphony orchestra, and the only non-family member who was permitted to teach any of them – had mentioned smores, she had fantasized about trying them) but they reminded her of Five. She set the dirty knife in the sink and closed the pantry door, carrying the plate back up the stairs to the atrium.

It was quiet and still, and she stared at the front door, breathing it in. It was cooler in the entrance, with the night air creeping in under the door. Somewhere else in the house, she could hear faint giggling. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she imagined she could hear  _ everything. _ The hum of Diego’s second fan, which he insisted upon despite the fact that he piled on two additional blankets on top of his comforter. The turning of Ben’s pages in the dark, while he stayed up to find out who the killer was. The scratching of Luther’s telescope on the windowsill, and the whispers of city noise outside because closing the window required adjusting the telescope, and he’d already gone through the trouble of setting it up to catch the next appearance of Mars of Venus, or a passing comet, or whatever it was Luther looked for the few nights he didn’t go to bed as soon as Dad asked. 

Vanya liked to imagine that she could hear it all, and that the sound collected in her chest, and that when she played her violin, she wove together all the soft noises people forgot about and left behind. She’d only ever told Five that. She looked down at the sandwich in her hand and swallowed hard.

Three hundred and fifty-eight days was a long time to be gone. 

She shivered. It was cold, and she wanted to go to bed. She walked towards the door. And then the silence was broken, and the air sparked with a sound almost like the crackle of electricity, and the room began to fill with circling blue light and wind, that sent her hair whipping around her face. Vanya yelped and dropped the plate, which hit the floor with a clatter, and stumbled back, holding her arm up over her eyes to block out the light, while something much larger than a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich fell to the ground with a graceless thud. 

And then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the light was gone. In its place was a boy.  _ The _ boy. Vanya lowered her arm and stared, rubbing her eyes. 

He stretched his fingers as if he’d lost track of something he’d been holding and stood up, glancing around, rubbing at his shoulder absently. He looked exactly as he always had, and she didn’t know why that surprised her as much as it did. 

“Where the hell–” he stopped speaking once he saw her. 

“Five,” Vanya breathed. 

* * *

The concert hall around him blinked out of focus, and the atrium left in its place was familiar. Too familiar. The one he’d pictured in the back of his mind for years, fixed and unchanging, with the well-tread carpet and the neatly polished sconces lining the walls. Reginald Hargreeves was never much for redecorating, but it  _ had  _ looked different. 

Five had been holding on to his siblings when he’d left and he didn’t see them now. He hadn’t been sure that his plan would work. And maybe he’d been an idiot to think that if he held onto their hands tightly enough that he wouldn’t lose them again. 

“Where the hell–”

“ _ Five _ .”

It was jarring, less than a minute after she’d destroyed the world, to see his sister’s face break out in a smile that was almost indescribably happy. She stood in front of him in the darkness, in those pale, striped pajamas they’d all used to wear, her long hair pulled into two loose braids and tied off with the kind of soft scrunchies Klaus used to steal and wear on his wrists. Her expression was soft, and wondering, and not quite believing and when she spoke the words came out tentative, as if she were afraid of breaking something. 

“Vanya.”

“I knew you’d come back,” she said. “I’ve been waiting. I – I’ve –”

And then she surged forwards and threw her arms around his shoulders, pulling him close to her, which was warm, and strange, and though he generally disliked hugs, it was a decidedly preferable way to be held when one compared it against the energy-tentacles she’d held him with earlier. 

“I missed you.”

_ You blew up the moon and destroyed the world.  _

Her arms linked behind his neck, pulling him closer. 

No.

_ You’re  _ going  _ to blow up the moon and destroy the world.  _

Like the carpet and the sconces and the stupid atrium,  _ this  _ Vanya was too familiar, and she was clutching him like she was afraid he might slip through her fingers like sand. Like his siblings of the future has slipped through his only moments before. It occurred to him dimly that he ought to hug her back, but his hands seemed to reject the notion.

“I missed you, too.” 

He sounded strange when he said it. Young. His voice in this body did usually, but no one really noticed when he was shouting. It wasn’t a lie, at least. 

**Author's Note:**

> Endless appreciation to my wonderful and talented beta reader.
> 
> Any and all feedback is appreciated!
> 
> Feel free to chat with me on tumblr, @itsthenovelteafactor


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